 of the Council Committee on Average Communications and Appointments. It is January 6th, 2020, and I am calling our meeting to order at 9.34 a.m. We have what could turn out to be a fairly ambitious agenda today, but I think that we can get through it, hopefully within the two hours we've allotted. So you have a packet that has several documents in it. My apologies that some of them weren't uploaded until yesterday evening, but they are all there, and I will get that on the town website once I can. The first agenda item, however, is discussion of the GOL proposal regarding OCA. So this was originally on our agenda for our December 20th meeting. And at that point, GOL had somewhat decided on the direction of which way that that committee was going to be going to propose a committee restructuring for the town council. Perts charge to evaluate town council standing committees. So GOL sort of made that decision the Wednesday before, and then we met on the 20th, and that was on our agenda. Unfortunately, Sarah wasn't able to attend that meeting, and Darcy had to leave that meeting early, and so wasn't around for that discussion. And so the discussion did occur, but it took place only between George, Alyssa, and myself. George and myself, of course, are on GOL, so it was really just a conversation with Alyssa. And so because of that, and because I want to make sure that OCA has discussed what GOL is proposing and has a response at tonight's council meeting, I've put it on our agenda again, so that we could have all members of OCA weigh in. The benefit of having this on the agenda again is we actually had the GOL proposal, and so that is in your packet, so hopefully you've got a chance to look through that. And so when I'm going to be, so basically the proposal involves the dissolution of OCA, reallocating appointments to the governance organizational legislation committee, and then creating a new committee that takes OCA's outreach component and merges it with some elements of the current CRC charge. So I'm going to step back and just ask for input from the full committee, but especially from Sarah and Darcy since they were not present for that first conversation. I wouldn't dare ever tell you not to. So I know that last time my computer was very unhappy, and so that was extremely distracting for me, but I would love to be reminded of whatever it was I said at that conversation last time because I don't really remember it, and I do remember being frustrated, as I just mentioned offline here, that GOL, while yes, this is in their charge, I would have thought talking to the committees before putting something out to council would have been the logical approach. I thought it was interesting that it wasn't done that way, and I would think that people would think, for example, that with OCA, that since we have two members of OCA on GOL, that people would assume that OCA had talked about it before it got floated, and so that didn't happen, and so that was just a different approach, and so I was just, I actually was just surprised by the whole thing because I didn't know it was actually gonna happen, and then it didn't happen here. So if I said anything useful last time, I'd love to remember that, but I don't remember the conversation, so I'll just let other people talk. I was gonna address those two things. Oh, technical. Is that what you said? I don't know if it was, like, there's just no share point. So Athena will look and then maybe, if we have to, we can call Sean. Yeah. Let me address, let's just, two points. Reminding you what you said. So, always, my recollection, and I don't have the minutes directly in front of me, but my recollection of that was basically one that you said that you felt as though you disagreed with some of the ways that CRC was divided up, but didn't necessarily articulate why, but the main, and we didn't spend a huge amount of time on this because it was at the end of what was already a very long movie meeting. One of the things that you were concerned about that we spent most of our time talking about was sort of the logistical considerations of restructuring while we're in the middle of executing a process we just adopted to appoint members of the planning board. And I informed Alyssa and the committee that I have had conversations with Lynn and also with Mandy Jo and one of the person whose name is escaping me right now to basically say Oka needs to carry out the process it just adopted. And so the agreement was the earliest the council might vote on a restructuring would be January 27th. That's on the agenda tonight for discussion, but the earliest vote would be January 27th at which point we should know sort of the timeline of our process. And the agreement that the president gave to me was that the motion to do the restructuring would have an effective date that would be after the council votes on the planning board appointments. So we might agree that we're gonna restructure, we might, she might start polling for membership, but it wouldn't actually go into effect until after we've appointed a member of the planning board. That of course assumes that this planning board appointment process goes smoothly and we end up doing that, but that conversation has been had. So that was what we spent most of our time with. As with regard to the second point, I will take that criticism because that is mine to take. My intention was for OCA to have a conversation about this before GOL moved forward. And I know that the chair of CRC did have this discussion with CRC and I know the chair of finance had a later discussion about it, about the recommendation of finance subsuming audit. The reason we did not have a conversation about it, to be perfectly honest, was that we were so consumed with the process that every meeting, in fact, if you look at, not that I would expect you to, but if you looked at our December 9th agenda, there was an original agenda and then a revised agenda and the original agenda actually had this on it as an agenda item. And then when I recognized what we didn't get to everything we needed to do on December 2nd, I took it off the agenda because for me, I was prioritizing getting a process in place. So it actually was scheduled to be on our December 9th agenda and then I bumped it to the 20th because we just didn't, that was when I still assumed we would get through the entire process on December 2nd and we were gonna do liaisons and that on December 9th. And so that December 20th meeting was created just for liaisons but also I was able to bump that. Of course at that point, GOL had sort of already made its recommendation to some extent. So that is, I mean, I would apologize to the committee for that. It had been my intention to bring it forward to us but every time I wanted to, we ended up meeting until noon about the process and it just sort of felt like we needed to get that process done. So then the earliest I was able to get it before this committee was December 20th. So that is on me. Thoughts about the, I don't wanna spend too, too much time on this because you do have a lot but I do wanna make sure Oka has sort of a response. Darcy. I have a little bit the same response as Alyssa in that the first I heard that this was even being considered was in the GOL report of December 16th. And that was just a little, like a list in your GOL report indicating kind of an outline of an overview of what you were thinking about. So I was pretty floored when I got this document with the proposed actual charges of committees because this feels like me, to me like something that should emanate from a council retreat or a full council discussion and then go to the GOL to be created. So it seems odd to me that obviously the GOL has had a few meetings where this has been thoroughly discussed but the rest of the council didn't know anything about it. And this seems like very monumental changes which I may very well agree with eventually some of them anyway. I don't really have any problems with dividing up the responsibilities of CRC or giving audit to the finance committee. I think the hardest one is the dissolution of OCA and figuring out what to do with our responsibilities if we did that and also kind of like giving up what goes to the CRC and the other committee. But even talking about it it makes me feel uncomfortable because I feel like it should have emanated from a full discussion with all 13 counselors. Sarah. So I've made a New Year's resolution to make sure that I communicated more openly and more constructively with the rest of my counselors, therefore to be more effective. I will say that although I realize that GOL felt that they had very important work and you discussed it amongst yourselves and then you brought it forth once you finally made a decision. I will say the way in which it was handled and I think that we could maybe look at this for later on. I'm gonna make some constructive suggestions later but I will say that when I found out the way that I did and agreed I had a migraine that day I wasn't here to hear it when it came to us. And then it also made me feel like well I better make sure that I read every single committee's minutes and anything that I can find in their SharePoint so that I don't, so that I feel like I know what every committee is doing and I will tell you the way it was handled. I did initially feel very angry and it made me feel more distrustful and so maybe we can just think like in the future was this, I don't know how it could have been handled differently but it did feel a little strange that this was such an in-depth conversation as it went on that two of our members like we just, and again, how do we do that and not violate open meeting law or do we, I don't know but I just wanted to say that and then with that out of the way to say that I did have some, if we tonight I think I'll bring this up I had some ideas about maybe restructuring like where some of the appointments went just to sort of even them out so that was another thing that it had occurred to me that maybe appointments, all of them didn't just go to GOL but perhaps as we're restructuring and thinking about more efficient ways to handle responsibilities it may be some appointments fit in other committees just more naturally. Okay and so again I will take responsibility for Oka not having had prior notice that is on me. You know one thing I do wanna, and George if you wanna pipe in as chair of Oka, I mean chair of GOL at any point. One thing I do wanna say is GOL hasn't actually voted on this yet so GOL isn't recommending this necessarily it hasn't voted on this and the idea was it's easier to have some of these, in the same way that our president when we had our first committee discussion brought some example committees to us and then we sort of said eh we don't like this, we like this, we like this. I think GOL felt it would be useful for the council and having this discussion which I think we all agreed should happen to have actual examples before them but GOL hasn't taken a vote yet. I think we view this January 6th meeting as that first conversation that Darcy sort of said of look we've been talking about this as the committee that's charged with doing so and here's sort of some of our ideas what do you think? But we haven't actually voted on this and I think the idea and I don't wanna speak for GOLs whatever information we get from the council is gonna guide our next discussion. That said I don't wanna necessarily be in a position where I'm explaining GOL and I wanna hear just more about this committee's thoughts on what's being recommended for OCA because we are the people who have been in this and we know what OCA's responsibilities are. Do we feel as though it makes sense to keep them in one body? Do we feel as though it makes sense to put appointment? I mean Sarah has expressed some thoughts about not putting appointments fully in GOL. Do we feel like it makes, I guess that's, I don't want us to, I'm happy to hear you critique me. That's fine. But I guess I'm more interested in hearing as the members of GOL who have been doing, sorry, OCA who have been doing this work for a year, how do we feel about what GOL is proposing because we're the ones who have the in-depth knowledge of those aspects of our charge, the outreach and the appointments and do we feel like what they're proposing is reasonable, makes sense? That's what I'm hoping OCA can have a response to because we're the ones who have the content knowledge. Sarah. So I think that early on when OCA started to meet, we were really exploring our charge and how we could be most effective in it. I think it became very clear to us early on that the outreach portion of our charge was not there. It wasn't there. We tried hard. We met with the RAC who let us know that they thought that our appointments process was pretty much cuckoo and way out there and they were going to follow a process that was more similar to what the select board had done and that that's what they were doing and they could meet with us every now and again but they didn't feel like OCA and RAC were two entities that worked together because we did different things. Then we have the community participation officers and we met with them and it became very clear that a lot of things that we thought that perhaps OCA would do were actually the charge of the CPOs and that they also, in many ways, worked for the town manager and that while they helped us tremendously, we didn't necessarily need to liaise with them about how to do things. They were going to be helping town council in many ways that we had originally thought maybe would be an OCA charge, like helping counselors set up their district meetings or helping with larger meetings that we had with the public or hearings and so that didn't seem to be part of our charge and I think we looked at that pretty in depth and we did the survey in which we wanted to gather some information for counselors and that was that. So I feel like and then when it comes to the appointments because if you're looking at restructuring and you're looking at efficiency, I would say if you do not want to have a five per, just a five person committee that works solely on one thing which is appointments and then has a lot of time off, it makes sense to dissolve OCA. However, I do feel that appointments even though they don't come up very often so you could say well a committee who deals with appointments, you're just gonna be working very sporadically. I think appointments we all know are incredibly important and we know that the rest of our counselors feel like it's incredibly important and we've seen that everyone really wants to have a hand in it and has an idea about how appointments go. I would rather instead of putting all of the appointments in GOL, I would be thinking about as your restructuring committees, we're trying to restructure them so that they're efficient and that nobody has like more power than another committee. I think that some of the things that GOL looked at were making sure that every counselor had something meaty to deal with to try to lessen our workload. We didn't have, one committee didn't have so many things and then another committee just wasn't meeting at all so there was a balance of workload as well. So I was thinking maybe that as you're restructuring things, the CRC would be broken into two parts and one of them deals mostly with planning and zoning right and really needs to know in depth about planning and zoning, that's what they're doing. And I think that one of the things that when we were doing appointments to the planning board and the zoning board of appeals, one of their complaints was that they did not feel like OKA knew enough about what they did as committees and I'm just thinking that maybe you put the planning and zoning appointments there because you do have a committee that's working very, very close, that's their job and so I think that that would be helpful. I would maybe say that GOL because they do more governance could maybe be the ones that take a look at Paul's appointments and handle those. If you're splitting up CRC and then you have a second half of CRC that does more interface with the things that have to do with the public, then maybe you say, maybe department heads go there because they might be something of that nature, like seeing where they fit. And another reason why I think that maybe you wanna split them up with different committees that have different areas of expertise is also, I think one of the things that OKA has struggled with is that we've really tried very hard in a very sincere way to make sure that we made appointments fair and transparent and that we also really listen to our other counselors and I think that we're still hearing that other counselors still are not feeling like they have enough control or they don't feel comfortable with it. I think that if you split up appointments between committees, I think that instead of having counselors feel like they're sympathetic with what we're going through, right? Because sympathy means you don't know what the person's going through, but you feel for them. You would have more empathy between committees about how the appointments process is done and the things that you're all struggling with and in which case I think that we would have more empathy and perhaps more just trust and understanding in the appointments process itself throughout the entire council. Alyssa? So to be clear, I'm not blaming you, I'm blaming GOL as a group because GOL could just as easily have said, oh, we haven't heard from OKA yet, they haven't had time to deal with this yet, we don't need to put this forward yet. I understand that I'm being told that even though it wasn't voted on, even though when you read the reams of information that GOL has provided, it certainly makes it seem like they think all those things are a pretty good idea. I think if it's just stated tonight for the public and for the rest of the counselors that there was no conversation here before that documentation was made, I think that's fine, I mean, we're all figuring this out as we go along. And Darcy mentioned a retreat, I would think of just waiting and saying we can't do it yet because they haven't gotten around to their part yet, just like when we refer things to finance committee and CRC at the same time and we say they haven't done their part on percent for art yet, so we can't act on it. So I do appreciate, as I also mentioned to George, I do appreciate the details that were provided by GOL in terms of, well, here would be some ways to look at it and there is a lot laid out there so that you can kind of look at it and go, hmm, well, maybe not that one. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so I appreciate all the work that went into that. Don't deny that that's fantastic. So I'm pleased with the product even though I wasn't pleased with the process. In terms, though, I think it's important to make that disclaimer tonight when it's first brought up rather than waiting for me to whine about it, is because it's not even close to equivalent to say talking to the finance committee chair about subsuming the incredibly minor, important, but minor work of the audit committee is anything like a conversation about disbanding, dissolving GEOCA and putting their things into other people. It's just not an equivalent conversation. Sure, we can all get, yeah, audit sounds great. They don't, nobody needs to fight about that. And I get that a lot of this really is more about CRC and how to break it up effectively. And if you're gonna break CRC up effectively then looking at how OCA might fit into that. I wanna remind us, though, that given exactly what we said earlier today about how we didn't have enough time to get to this conversation, there's no way GOL is gonna be able to do anything else, any of their other work if they eat all of the appointment work because we're still doing this process. This process isn't done yet. So even if we do the planning board interviews on the 22nd and make that appointment, we're not fully finished with figuring out our process. So one thing I would hope that we would consider is maybe doing this in stages. That's something I think I could get behind, like moving, we'll pick on the audit thing, moving the audit piece into finance and then potentially breaking up CRC into the new, I've already forgotten the acronym, but you'll teach it to me, has a T in it. And see how that goes. And then we then phase over a month later, like two months, I mean like six months from now, I mean like just a little bit later. But I don't think we have to restructure OKA right away. I think we could go ahead with the other parts of it because I don't disagree that in theory it makes sense, either Sarah's method or the method that's been outlined. The other thing I wanna make sure that I don't think, I'm sure that GOL must have talked about a lot, but I don't think I really got from the paperwork that we received in the packet, which is really helpful, is how many committees each of us are gonna serve on. Because it's really confusing to me how that's gonna work just in terms of number of seats and I'm sure that there must have been some conversation about that, so I just wonder if that could be shared with us because that helps inform me as to what's happening because I feel like OKA has been treated poorly by the entire council on numerous occasions. And so now I feel like we're kind of being punished. So I just wanna be clear that I know that's not what the GOL's goal was. I know that because I know the people that are there and that's not what their goal was, but it certainly does still feel like this is just a continuation of let's kick OKA some more. So helping me to understand as you're trying to balance this workload, how many people are serving on how many committees and that would help me a lot. Darcy. Yeah, I would just like to say that I would hope that the, I feel like there's a definite place for an appointments committee. And I know that when Lynn initially put together these committees, there was already a city services committee that she proposed and it was pulled off the table and now it's coming back. And a lot of Northampton has a similar system with the same committees including a city services and a CRC type committee and an appointments committee and so on. And obviously there is a reason for appointments and it is different from what everybody else is doing. And one possibility, I don't like to think that we're dissolving OKA because we're creating another committee and we are all beyond our capacity and just feel like we can't have another committee. So we have to dissolve a committee in order to have this new committee. So, and I also share Alyssa's feeling that, there's a little bit of a sense that the council might wanna get rid of OKA for whatever reason. I just feel like as we go on, we will need to have people that are doing appointments somewhere there, it'll probably have to be, if it isn't OKA, it'll have to be a subcommittee of another committee probably. And if we just retained OKA and just met once a month, after we get all of our processes done and all we're doing is actually appointments, we could just meet once a month and just deal with appointments. And that would be that and it would be very simple. We'd get the appointment recommendations and then we'd just meet to do the appointments. And it seems like that is more clear cut than trying to fit it into some committee that is or is not really related to appointments. Sarah. Yeah, so I wanna kinda gather or continue on some of that thought, which is when you're thinking about restructuring committees, like I said, I can see where you can say, well, this committee is only doing one thing and they don't meet very often once things get set. Why don't we put it somewhere else? I have a couple of thoughts on that. One is that it's true. I, you know, OKA does, has taken a lot of flack for the work that we've done and I really feel like a lot of the counselors either are frustrated by us or I'm just, I'm gonna say it. I feel like there's not a lot of respect for the work that we've done and I feel like other counselors find us frustrating and part of what this seems like is saying to me, I agree with Alyssa in the fact that it seems that what's being said is this group is not doing this the way we would like it to be done. We're not happy with their work. Let's put it somewhere where we feel like it's in better hands and that could just me feeling, you know, ornery and I'm old. But at the same time, we have worked very hard on these processes, right? And each process, we've come up with a second process that we worked really hard to address all of the concerns of other counselors and we only met with IR when we brought it up. It was still, I think that the entire council needs to vote on this before OKA gets away from itself again. So, I also enjoy working with all the counselors that I work with and I just wanna say that is we're, if you want to fold this in somewhere else, I think, as Alyssa said, that the process should still be thought of. I would feel uncomfortable if this got handed over to someone else and all of a sudden every single process that we worked on was suddenly just thrown out. I will tell you that that would make me feel pretty uncomfortable. And also, I think that GOL, as far as its structure is, is very powerful and there's nothing wrong with that. We have finance committee that is also incredibly powerful. I just do not see taking something as important, you know, our president said to me, you know, OKA with his appointments is an incredibly powerful committee. But then what you're doing is you're taking something that's also a very powerful responsibility and then putting it into a committee, GOL, that already has an incredible amount of powerful responsibility. So that's why I'm thinking of, if you're not gonna leave us to just do, you know, say we're on other committees and we do just handle this here and again and that's our thing and we keep that power in one place, then I think as we're looking at putting this appointment somewhere else, that we're still evening out the powerful decisions. That's... Okay, so I think what I'm hearing with regard in response to the proposal based on OCA's experience is some concern from members of OCA about putting appointments in GOL for various reasons, one being workload, one being perhaps a lot of power, one being that they're very separate and also something that really need to be handled on their own and there's been a few ideas of perhaps separating out appointments and spreading them to a few different committees or having OCA stay as a sixth standing committee of the council that just meets to do appointments perhaps once a month. So that's information that I would hope to relay to the council tonight that based on OCA's experience with appointments, there is some disagreement with about moving appointments and here's why. Did you have something to add? I guess I just feel like if we're gonna have a discussion with the whole council, I mean, I know you're gonna make your report of the committee that we discussed it, but if we're having a discussion of the whole council, we'll probably wanna say our things ourselves. You know what I mean? Yeah, my whole thing is I don't, and I don't know how the president is intending to structure the discussion about this tonight, but if there is, if I am looked to for a response from OCA, I mean, certainly you would expect every member of the council will have their own opinion to give, but if there's any question about, you know, what OCA's discussion about this meant, that would be my attempt to summarize it. George. I agree with Darcy that in the best of all possible worlds, this probably should have been the product of a retreat. And that's kind of what I envisioned at one point a long time ago, but given all the things that we are being asked to do and demands on everyone, I felt this was a good way to get a conversation started. It's already eaten up 40 minutes of this meeting, which I think at this point, the chair rightly probably would like to move on, and I think we should. I'm terrified that it's going to use up a huge amount of time tonight. I think the point, the purpose of what we did was simply to get people to think about, the council to think about how we've been functioning through the first year. And here's a suggestion, and obviously it provokes some response, which is exactly what we wanted. And where we proceed from here, I don't know, but certainly there was no intention to say, well, here's what we should do, we've decided da, da, da, da, da. It's just to get us all to be in thinking about how we could do this better. And that's not an easy thing to do, but that's what I think our purpose in creating this document was, and to get you to think about it, and to then decide how you want to proceed. You might want to make this the subject of a retreat. You might, I mean, I just hope tonight we don't spend an hour and a half talking about it, which is probably what we'll do. Not because it's a done deal, it isn't at all. It's to get people to begin to think about how we might better organize ourselves. And that's, so that was the purpose. It's obviously provokes some response, which is fine. I don't feel like apologizing for GOL, quite frankly, and I don't intend to tonight. It's simply a matter of trying to get a conversation started. And where you all decide as a body to go from there is a decision we'll make tonight, and hopefully we'll not spend the entire night discussing all this, but we'll come to some sense of what would be a good way to proceed. A retreat wouldn't be a bad idea. Sarah? The last thing I'm gonna say about this, because I agree with George, wow. We are talking about dissolving a committee. Some of us are not on other committees, but took this on as our sole responsibility. And I have to say that when you originally go to a committee and say, let's talk about dissolving us, it might be all very well and good if you're sitting on a committee that has decided that this could be a good idea. But what I feel like is being said is, oh, there goes Olga again, just talking and talking and talking. And there's better things to talk about than your being dissolved, so shush now. That's how I feel. I feel really angry about it. Okay, so I do want us to get to some of the other agenda items. Could I ask you all to address something tonight? Which would be given that you are portraying this as a, we did a ton of work that was simply to get a conversation started versus this is a proposal, which is not clear from the paperwork, is that, and from the process that was used and the fact that you don't even want to talk about it anymore, is that, which I don't know when we're gonna talk about it since we've been trying to schedule a retreat for three months, is how does this impact our committee assignments, right? Because isn't that part of why you're doing this right now is because you expected that there might be a shuffling in committee assignments because people say, oh, I don't really like doing this anymore, I'd like to try doing this other thing. But if you don't know what that other thing is, because it's gonna be a new thing, I just, I don't know if you have a sense from the president or you can say tonight, we're concerned about that interface too, right? Like, are we gonna all change committees and then change the committees or are we gonna change the committees and then all change committees? That's for sure, yeah. Okay, so I wanna move on to agenda item four. So there is a document in your packet labeled sufficiency of the pool discussion guidance. This was my attempt to bring together all of the information once it loads on my computer that I thought would be useful for this discussion. It's not loading on my computer, so hopefully it's loading on your computers. So per the process that we adopted on December 9th, section three says that before we can proceed to actually conducting interviews, OCA needs to by majority vote, declare that the applicant pool is sufficient to proceed to those interviews. So in the document that I put in the packet, sufficiency of the pool discussion guidance, I have a few different things. So one is the actual just cut and paste text from the process that we adopted so you don't have to go try and find what we're doing in the process itself. On page two, I labeled relevant information. I took, I broke down the process or the text of the process and sort of annotated it a bit. Page three is an email sent by the planning board chair. Page four are my notes from a meeting that I had with the planning board chair. And then page five is some demographic information. So where I think I want to focus on is page two for the first part of this discussion. And so there are sort of five different considerations that I saw in the text that we adopted with regard to declaring the applicant pool sufficient. I think two are sort of checkboxes and I think the other three are really discussions. So the first one is that we cannot declare the pool sufficient until the vacancy notice has been published on the Town Bullets and Board for at least 14 days. That's a charter requirement. The vacancy notice was published on the Town Bullets and Board on October 21st, 2019. So we have more than met that requirement. The second thing was that OCA shall collect all CAFs submitted over the preceding two years. The OCA chair or designee shall contact any applicant who submitted their CAF prior to the posting of the vacancy notice to confirm continued interest. I have done that. I actually reached out to everyone who submitted a CAF not just those before the posting of the vacancy notice because it did take us quite some time to get a process together and people may have changed their mind in those several months. I will say that this was a challenging feat that I've learned before we had Town staff pull together the CAFs and contact people and do all the interviews. The reason we did this process is we wanted complete control over that. I will say from experience that that is challenging in part because where we keep this information varies with the change of government we started using Civic Plus. Before that it was an access database. They don't necessarily track well. So this involved lots of long phone conversations with Angela to get the full list. But I did contact every person who submitted a CAF for the planning board from October 21st, 2017 until anyone who submitted after that. That included, I'll also note, people who submitted and have been appointed to other committees. So, you know, for the appointed committee handbook, generally we say no more than two standing committees per person for service. But also we recognize that some people might wanna leave a committee if they have a different opportunity. And so I did not, the only people I filtered out of contacting were people who we confirmed did not live in Amherst. There were some people who lived in Springfield and Belcher Town and those I did not contact because they're ineligible. But other than that, I did not filter anyone out. As far as the other, so those are the two check boxes. Those two things have been done. As far as the other three things, we said that we aren't having any type of thresholds. We look at the pool holistically, but there are three things that we're looking at. One is the number of applicants relative to the numbers of vacancies or impending vacancies. OCAS strives for more applicants than vacancies. We currently have one vacancy. We do have more applicants than vacancies. We said the demographic diversity of the applicant pool, OCAS strives for a diverse applicant pool, including racial, economic, gender, and generational diversity. There is demographic information of the confirmed pool on the fifth page. I think we can all agree this is an area where the pool is lacking. And then the third thing is the current needs of the body to be appointed, including any current burdens placed on the body by a vacancy. You can see in the email from the planning board chair. Also, I've reported from conversations had with planning director, Chris Brestrup, that there is a feeling amongst the planning board and planning department that there is a burden placed on the planning board by this vacancy. The ZBA, of course, we know we've heard there is not so much of a burden because they have associates to pull from. The planning board does not have associates to pull from. So right now they have only six members because special permits and site plan review require five votes that the planning board chair and the planning director have reported have been a burden for the committee because what that means is that if someone can't be at a meeting or if there's a conflict of interest, then that presents a big challenge for the planning board because they need to be able to make sure they can get to those five votes. But we saw that play out in the fall when Amherst College had a project in front of them and two of the planning board members were abutters, which meant that literally that project could not be approved unless the town council approved a waiver, which the council did do. But if the council opted not to approve that waiver for those two abutters, there were only four people who could vote on that project and they need five votes. And so we've heard from the planning department and from the planning board that this vacancy has actually been a fairly significant burden and there is a desire to see someone appointed quickly. So when we're looking at the pool holistically, these are the three things that we want to look at is the number of applicants we know we have more than there are vacancies, the demographics and the current burdens placed. And so we know we have more applicants than vacancies. I think we will probably agree that the demographics are lacking a bit, but we do know also that there is a burden. Before we move on to actually looking at who is in the pool, are there comments on this? Do we want to have a discussion on this stuff? What's in this document, and especially those last three points? Alyssa. I was gonna pipe up that although you laid out a lot of terrific information here and maybe didn't even put enough emphasis on something you actually provided to us, which was the email that we've gotten from the planning board chair and the conversation that you'd have with the planning board chair. I appreciate you attaching those to both the sufficiency of the pool discussion and the other item on selection guidance because just like the things we put in our process about what's important, right? The demographic diversity, you explain that all really well and the logistical nature of you actually meaning of bodies to do it is that sufficiency of the pool is also related directly to, just as it says in that sentence, the current needs of the body to be appointed. And so I think that's so important and I really appreciate that you were able to work in not only that email, but that she'd sent us previously, but also a separate conversation because that does tell us a ton. Like to be fair, we don't have diversity and we're not gonna have diversity in the short run because we have a lot of work to do on that and we haven't traditionally had diversity on the planning board and so I'm not dismissing that because it frustrates the heck out of me, but I wanna make sure that given that we can't get that right now, we're at least meeting the needs of not just bodies, but the kinds of bodies that they need. I think that's so important. It would be a really, it would have been a bad idea to try and say sufficiency of the pool without knowing what they were actually looking for right now in addition to all of our generally held concepts about diversity. Other thoughts on what's in this document? And I think this highlights a discussion that we had when we were coming up with this section about thresholds. I think for me and I'm speaking personally, I am fine with the number of people in the pool but I am very uncomfortable with the demographics of the pool because if you look at the information, it is 100% white or Caucasian, which I've been told I can't recategorize people so I am presenting them as separate categories. It is 100% white or Caucasian men over the age of 50 and this is to fill a vacancy that was held by this community standards young woman of color. And so to fill that seat from a pool that is 100% white and Caucasian men over the age of 50 feels personally uncomfortable to me and I think this is not the pool that I would have liked to see. And I know I certainly did in my personal capacity reaching out to people to say, do you know anyone who can apply? Especially do you know any women who would be interested? I think that, and I know others did their own personal outreach to try to get people to apply. And so I am personally uncomfortable with the demographics of the pool but I also in recognizing it in the context of we have heard from the planning board since honestly before the resignation that they are facing a challenge and really need another body. And so I think this is a good example of what we were anticipating when we came up with this process of saying we're not gonna have rigid thresholds, we have to look at the pool holistically. Darcy. I don't have anything to say about that but I would like to mention something about the previous two pages, the Christine Gray-Mullen's letter and your meeting with her. Seems like your meeting with her went over basically, you know, what the planning board needs with our interview questions sort of in mind. And her letter on the other hand, she listed four things the planning board was looking for that are really different from the list that you got from your meeting with her. And so one of the things that seems pretty amazing about her letter is that she says she's looking for an individual that's willing to put in a time commitment of five to 12 hours a week. That's a lot. That is a huge amount. So I don't know what we're going to do with that if we have people who are willing to put in two hours a week. I mean, I don't know if we're gonna, I don't think we'll ask that question but that seems pretty, pretty a big heavy load. And she also says, she also expresses a philosophical bent in number two that she wants someone who feels positive and committed to strengthening and growing Amherst Economic Development and building housing infrastructure, particularly in the downtown and village areas. So that's exactly what we said we weren't going to ask as an interview question. So I'm not sure what we're gonna do with that. Yeah, so I'm gonna just pause that conversation because I think that comes in two places. So one is the next conversation that I hope we can get through today, which is selection guidance, which we said we'd provide. And then the other thing is the interview questions. And I think you're right, those things is, this is the email from the chair of the planning board but ultimately the council is the appointing body and we're the committee that sort of handles this. And so it'll be on us to say, do we want to put that in selection guidance? Do we want to incorporate that into an interview question or not? Okay, so any other comments on sort of this document? Okay, so I'm going to hand out another document but I wanted to preface it with some information. So this is the results of my outreach to people who submitted community activity forms from October 21st, 2017 until present and shows you who is still interested, who has withdrawn and who never got back to me. And I did, for most of these people, I did try to contact them multiple times, recognizing of course this is not the easiest time of year to get in touch with people but it's sort of the hand we were dealt. And so there are two different tables. One shows the results of my contact and then the other shows a breakout of the people who are still interested. I want, before I hand this out, I want to remind this committee that CAS are personnel records. Still by our policy, they are not public documents. This has information from those CAS and so by extension should also be treated as a personnel record. This document is a confidential document. It is not public record. Also remember that we do not disclose names or numbers prior to the posting of interviews, which has not been done. And so we are going to have a conversation about whether you feel comfortable with the pool so that we can decide whether we're gonna declare the pool sufficient. But at no point during this conversation, are we to say the number of people or the names of any individuals? Are there questions on that? And I will be collecting this at the end of the meeting. Yes. So take a couple minutes just to read through the document and then just give me some signal when everyone is ready to have the discussion. Can I just get an update from people about, are we about ready to move on? Are we still considering this document? Darcy? Yeah, I'm wondering what was the process around getting a response? I'm sorry, what do you mean? In other words, did you send one email or what, how does that work? I sent an email, the email actually, the text of the email is in the packet so you can see what the email actually looked like. And then for folks who I did not hear back from within about a week, I sent a follow-up email. And to be honest, most of the responses I got were to the follow-up email because the first email was sent, I think on December 18th, so most people are probably getting ready for the holidays. Okay, so the question before us is whether or not to declare the applicant pool sufficient to proceed to interviews. So as I said before, we have three considerations. One is the number of people. We know we have more applicants than we have vacancies. Two is the demographics. Where we strive to have a demographically diverse pool. And three are the current needs of the body. We know that the body is struggling with this vacancy. The other thing that Alyssa brought up is not just about numbers, but making sure that there are people who could bring, I think, skills to the body, which is why knowing who's in the pool in this document is important. So again, this conversation needs to happen without disclosing names or numbers, but I am asking for the committee's input on based on the information you have in front of you, whether or not you feel as though the pool is sufficient to move forward to interviews. Anyone have thoughts on that, Darcy? I guess my only thought would be if we wanted more diversity that we could make a phone call to the women because there are some women with no response. But I don't feel strongly about that. Yeah, I will say, the order of the names are in order of when, you may have noticed this, when they submitted their CAF. And so unfortunately, we did have one woman who was a recent CAF who withdrew. And many of the others have replied that, they'll also withdrew because they had been appointed to other committees. And so, yeah, we could do that. One thing I do wanna also distress, I was gonna mention this before, is remember that we did, we discussed this when we were discussing the process and we also discussed this in our last meeting, say, once we schedule interviews, if we get additional applicants and they can meet the interview dates, then declaring the pool sufficient today doesn't cut the pool off. And so, for instance, if we declare the pool sufficient and then we hear from another person who hasn't yet responded, we can keep contacting these people or if we get more applicants as long as they're available on the interview date once we set it. So, declaring the pool sufficient just allows us to proceed to interview. It doesn't close the pool. Other thoughts? Sarah. Sorry, Evan, this is just, did you say you also called? You said there was a lot of phone calls. So, you did also. I did not call these people. The phone calls I referenced were with Angela trying to just get in the pool. I'm just gonna say a suggestion that you can take or leave or throw out or whatever is that because this was something that I had for a task, the original time around, there were some people that I can say that I may or may not recognize from this list that I found that I was only able to contact by phone. And I don't know if that matters or not. I mean, I'm just saying that maybe we should think about, like, I think you did a great job. I'm just saying maybe we should institute something saying we send one email and then a follow-up or there aren't phone calls or there are. Just, I think for as far as process goes, I think that's a good thing to hit. And I'll say to the committee, if you would like me to, regardless of what we decide in this meeting today, if you would like me to call the non-respondents, I would be more than happy to. And I think my thought had been if we still hadn't heard from people in a while, I would call, honestly, I ran out of time because also the past two weeks have been very busy. But yes, no, I agree. George. Just concerned about the demands on the chair. This is something that I think in the rest of the world would be done by staff. That's my concern about having him or her make multiple phone calls, emails, knock on doors. It's at some point this becomes, understand the motivation. We wanna try and reach everybody and make sure everybody has a chance to respond. But I'm also concerned about the burden on the chair. And I don't understand why this could not be something done by staff. But apparently that's, anyway, that's my concern. I think the body, what we have in front of us is sufficient to proceed. Obviously, we prefer a larger number. We prefer more diversity. But given the needs of the committee and given what we see in front of us, I'm certainly willing to say that I would like to proceed with this pool that it's sufficient. Sorry. So I agree with George. This is a really big responsibility to give someone and we're elected officials, but we're, you know. Here's the thing that I will say is that these are still volunteer positions. And I think myself that I found out a lot more about how deeply people felt about these positions. And maybe if there might have been people who sort of were waffling a little bit. And I myself found the phone calls helpful. So maybe something we might wanna do, which I think this that Oka thought about before was, this is a huge responsibility for one person. So perhaps maybe the chair does delegate some of these things to, and again, in a different committee, maybe somebody else, you know, you delegate someone to do some of the extra calling so that it's not such a burden to just the chair. Alyssa. I'm sorry that it was so complicated to get the paperwork. It's always been complicated to get the paperwork. I don't know why three-tail managers ago we didn't provide adequate resources to staff to better manage the paperwork. It's that blunt. It's always been a nightmare for staff to deal with the paperwork, no matter which format we were using. And so that has always been frustrating. So appreciate that they worked with you on this. In terms of making the phone calls, I think it actually, again, delegation is always a beautiful thing. But of course then different people might feel like they're getting treated differently. But as much as I, on the one hand, believe that if you can't respond to an email, which is how you submitted your application, then you're just not interested anymore. Except I don't believe there was a deadline specified in the email. There's not. And so that makes it a little harder for me to cut people off. But the, and then in terms of the actual phone call making, I don't think it's appropriate for staff to make the phone call because I didn't think it was appropriate for staff to be doing that the first time, which is that this is our appointment. This is an appointment by somebody from the town, people from the town council. And so while I think that they ought to be able to just crank out a spreadsheet for you like that, and if they can't, that's a town manager problem. Should not be our problem or their problem, it's a town manager problem. That then people need to feel like the people who are appointing them are the ones who are talking to them and talking to them about the fact that they might already be on a different committee and did they wanna change. I don't think that's a clerical task. I think that's a welcoming people into the, oh, you're serving on such and such, oh, great. How's that going? You know, it becomes this whole outreach and community thing. But I also get that it's a huge amount of work for one person. So I could imagine, given where we're at, given that they didn't get a deadline, that we could go, if we agree based on what we have, that we have a sufficient pool based on all the different criteria we've talked about, that we could then send out an email, meaning you, until you delegated to somebody else, an email that says, this is when it's gonna be. You need to tell me by such and such date if you're gonna be there, and then I can send you a bunch of stuff or I can send you the stuff and then you can change your mind, but people can always do that. But I know that one of the things, for example, that we'll be sending them is the handout that we created that's now on the planning board webpage because it was so awesome that we worked on. But if that needs to be beefed up in terms of the time commitment, for example, or anything like that, then that can be sent out to people. But I think that if we do the sufficient pool, we can still, just like you said, if people can make it, we can still send out a thing that says, okay, we decided we're going forward with this date. You need to tell me by 12 noon on such and such date if you're gonna be there or not. And then maybe call them. All right, this is all actually really good input because this is the first time we're doing this. And I had a lot of thoughts about, I didn't make phone calls for a few different reasons, one of which is I'm a millennial and we don't do that very often. But the other of which was also, I remember especially as we dealt with some issues with the non-voting resident members of the finance committee, there was some concern about, oh, well, I had a phone call and this is what I thought they said. And so I kind of liked the idea of having the actual text. So if you heard back from someone and they said, no, I was interested, it's not just, well, they told me on the phone or this is how I interpreted that. And so I did kind of want to have it in text, but I think that Sarah's point is also well taken that sometimes some people it's just easier to get. On phone, yeah. Bringing that up. Now that I think about it, my generation probably taught yours about avoiding phones because I avoided them at all costs. But now that I think about it, people actually who are over my coming age of 50, some of them do actually prefer to talk on the phone. I'm just gonna put it that way, just as a NF way, I just do 10 bit of information, no pushing. Okay. Okay. There was something else I was gonna say, but I already forgot it. So, uh-huh. So the question again before us is based on all of the information we have is the pool sufficient to proceed to interviews? Okay. So we need to, I'm seeing a majority of the committee nod. So we need to do it by majority vote. So does someone want to make a motion to declare that the applicant pool for the planning board is sufficient to proceed to interviews? I so move. George has moved. Is there a second? Is there a second? I will second. Okay. So the motion has been made in second to declare that the applicant pool for the planning board is sufficient to proceed to interviews. Is there any additional discussion? Okay. All those in favor please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Aye. So that is unanimous. Okay. So the second thing before us or the second, the fifth agenda item is development and vote on planning board selection guidance. So in your packet there is another document which has most of the same information as Alyssa pointed out. Labeled selection guidance, discussion guidance. And so what we said is prior to developing interview questions or holding interviews, OCA shall by majority vote, adopt selection guidance for filling the vacancy that OCA provides to the town council in advance of interviews. And so this is our way of sort of developing. We didn't want to, we used the word criteria before and decided we didn't want to use criteria but guidance, guidance for how we might select someone, what we're going in looking for that we would provide to the town council to help them in their deliberations. There were two areas that we looked at. One was criteria for a healthy multiple member body which you might remember we had some discussion on and the other was input from the body's chair. So again to attach to this document are two things. One is an email from the planning board chair regarding what she felt would be useful. And then the other are my notes from the meeting with the planning board chair which as Darcy said we're a little more focused around what exactly they think would be useful. So what we're looking to do here is come up, as I would say probably go through these and say is this something that we feel as OCA we want to include in the document that helps us and by extension the council evaluate candidates during interviews. So, Alyssa. Do we have, I meant to do this on the weekend, do we have at your fingertips the questions we asked planning board candidates last time? Because to me that, you know it's like where does the concept fit? Is it within the question or is it within the selection criteria or is it kind of, it's kind of both, hopefully. I think that is a good point and I can pull that up. I can try and find, I thought it was in a folder that it's apparently not in. So I will. Does anybody remember the date of the meeting, the infamous meeting, do you remember it, Sarah? The date that we brought the initial, that that would have been in the packet. It was traumatic and I lost it from my mind but I'm sure that I could find it. My computer is unfortunately struggling today. Bound, it was in the report too, right? You're looking at that, okay. They should be in the report. Are you in the report now? And they're there? Yay. I'll wait for Sarah to come back. I'll take, well, since we're so long, I'll take these documents back. Yep, that's right, I have to. Yes. Are you in the report to town council? It's on, oh, you know what it is? So this is, now you're, this is, our pages are numbered, so this is page 21 of the document but page 16 of the report, right? Because this, to technically, this report was an addendum to a much shorter report that would have had different page numbers. So it's page 21 of the document. So, again, so what's the subject before us right now is selection guidance. And so we have the interview questions here. You have in that document that I provided for you, input in two forms, one via email and one being a meeting from the planning board chair about what she feels the needs of the body are. And now we need to put together a draft document of what we feel the council should consider and look at when it's evaluating the candidates in the interview. And I think Alyssa's question is well taken, which is some of this might be better represented in selection guidance, where some of it might be better represented in the interview questions. The interview questions, that will be the topic, that's on our agenda today, that will be the topic of our Wednesday meeting. And so I think what we wanna do is look at, is perhaps the best way to do this because our interview questions from last time were very vague is perhaps look at the input we got from the planning board chair and think about how we want to utilize that. So what we heard, let me talk about actually my meeting with the planning board chair. And this occurred on October 18th, so this was shortly after the planning board vacancy appeared and the conversation that I had the planning board chair which you have all of the notes I took, which I'm realizing now were somewhat sparse, is a desire to see someone come onto the planning board that has some pre-existing professional expertise. And the reasons for that were numerous. One was that our planning board in the opinion of the planning board chair is a very young planning board in that most of the people who would be considered the senior members of the planning board have not actually been there that long. And so as we've heard time and time again, there's a big learning curve for the planning board and so there's a desire to have someone who doesn't necessarily need a whole lot of training who can sort of just jump right in because this is a planning board that doesn't have sort of that long-term institutional knowledge or experience. The second reason is because this is a regulatory body that deals with fairly technical subject matter and there was a desire to have someone that has some professional expertise related to that subject matter and in particular she pulled out four areas of expertise, real estate, development, planning or urban planning and zoning. Those were the areas that she felt like were really missing with regard to expertise. And then the third thing that she discussed which is sort of represented in here is the idea that there are certain perspectives and certain areas of expertise that are important to have on the planning board, some of which are already there and so don't necessarily need to be duplicated. And so for example, it is useful to have a lawyer on the planning board because they make a lot of legal decisions. The planning board currently has two lawyers and so there isn't necessarily, her thing was legal expertise is important. We have two of the six current people are lawyers. We don't necessarily need another lawyer. We have a hydrologist which is important because they deal with a lot of stormwater stuff and so her feeling was that hydrology was sort of covered. There's someone who has no real professional background in the planning board who sort of serves the role as a lay person or who brings the perspective of the public and so the feeling was that there wasn't necessarily another need for that. But there is a need for, especially these four areas because there isn't anyone, there's an architect on the planning board. There isn't some and there's an engineer on the planning board and so architect engineer lawyer, hydrology, sort of public perspective. All of those are well represented on the planning board right now but someone with real estate experience, development experience, actual planning experience or experience with zoning, that is not currently represented and so her feeling was that those would be really the areas we'd want to look for to bring into the fold. So that was my meeting with the planning board chair which hopefully is a little bit more useful than the sparse notes that I have here. So, and that sort of also represented here. So the question is how do we want to use this information to fulfill section 4B of our process which asks us to get input from the body's chair and incorporate that into selection guidance. Sarah. I would just write, I mean I think that the last time I did it I wrote, I think all of us wrote down what the chair said and then used that for guidance. So I mean we would simply say the chair is looking for someone with real estate, development and I'm sorry I don't remember the last. Planning or zoning. She feels that they need someone who already has, they don't need another lay person and they specifically would like someone who has knowledge of how boards and committees work. So someone who's already served on boards and committees. So I would simply write down what she has communicated and use them as part of our guidance. I believe that's what we did before. So I think we are, if we are taking into consideration what the chair would like, I think we already have something very specific. Okay. Yeah, we've never officially made selection guidance, that's what we did last time. And so I think the question is do we wanna do that where we literally just reproduce what the chair said or do we wanna pick and choose and it sounds like you're saying let's just reproduce it but make sure it's clear this is the chair. Yeah. Just stay because I think that one of the things that we're continually hearing from other counselors is that they care very deeply about what a chair thinks. So we can use this as for our selection guidance to say here's what the chair wants, here's what we found and then we recommend and then the rest of the council makes their decision. Okay. Darcy. I think this should be part of our guidance. It shouldn't be our selection criteria. It's just something that we, it's a consideration for us to look at. Okay. So I guess, and again, we've never officially made selection guidance before we're sort of figuring out what this even means to us and so perhaps the selection guidance would have a couple of different sections and one would just say here's what the chair wants and so clearly labeled this is not OCA's opinion. This is not what OCA is saying needs to happen. This is what the chair says but then there would be other sections. Yeah. So I think in some respects that's what we did is one of the things we looked at is like, okay, let's look at this body holistically, right? And so what makes a healthy body that we look at what the chair wants and then I feel like you just sort of put things down through the filter. You know, I don't think that we've always chosen what the chair wanted and maybe we rethink where that got all of us and just, yeah. So you're looking at what makes a body healthy and then you're looking at what the chair has asked for and I'm not sure if there's anything else that we want to take into consideration. I'd be open to listening to that. Okay. Other thoughts? Darcy? I, if we're just talking about this you know, I expressed my opinion. I think this should be taken into consideration. I guess I, it... Nowhere have we really talked about, you know, having a diversity of voices on the planning board and that's not the chair's concern. So those are just two separate things. Okay. Alyssa. I guess I'm seeing three sections at this point. The criteria for a healthy multiple member body, which we have agreed on in the past. And then A was criteria, B was input from the body's chair. So then that's clearly specified that that's from the chair. And C is beyond the healthy body which is generically true, right? We look at, we look at through that lens at all committee appointments, then specifically for planning board. And so just as, so it's like we're already filtering down, right? Cause we've got the healthy member body that's for everybody. Then we've got what the planning board chair thinks and now we've got what we think about the planning board given what we've been hearing. And so diversity of opinion might be one, not having a specific viewpoint on a particular existing project like that we're specifically trying to accommodate a specific viewpoint or not. I mean, that might be the place that we address those kinds of concerns. When we said very clearly here, we're not gonna ask that question, but as that comes out over the course of the interview, for example, or is known to people for people's political views because they've written Ludge to the editor or whatever. How that, how we view that because I think we should be upfront about what we mean by diversity of opinion. Do we mean that there are people who would argue that developers all think the same way. And I would put you in a room with two developers and tell you they think completely different ways about how to do things. So I think that that's a silly assumption on people's part, but that tends to be a political rallying cry. Developers are bad, they all think the same way. And so I think we should elaborate a little bit on that, maybe not knock ourselves out, but it's a way of reflecting the current political reality that we're all facing. Okay, so what I think I'm hearing is a three-part selection guidance. One would sort of just be literally reproduction, maybe contextualized slightly, of A, criteria for a healthy multiple-member body, which to be honest, I think for this discussion is not necessarily as relevant because we're only dealing with one vacancy. None of the people are a potential reappointment to the planning board. And so to some extent, I think A is a little bit moot here. B, which would be input from the body's chair, where we're literally just going to be reproducing with the chair clearly labeled, reproducing what the chair told us. And then C will sort of be OCA's other considerations, other things we might want to think about that I think we might want to make sure that we have at least a majority agreement on here. So with that, then it seems like A and B are sort of already written. And so the question is, what is C? What is not covered in the input from the planning board chair and from sort of the generic A that we want to include as we're looking at candidates as the council is looking at candidates, here's some other things we want people thinking about, which I think is really, we need to make sure we're not using the word criteria because none of this is criteria, right? We proactively decided not to use the word criteria when we discussed this section, it's guidance. It's here's what we want you thinking about. Here's some things that we want you to consider as you're looking at these people. So what do we want those things to be? Darcy. Just to repeat what I said previously, I think that we need to have a diversity of voices on the planning board, and we have to look at that to make sure that the different voices in town are represented there. So that it's not a monolith of one point of view putting forward an agenda where we know for a fact that, you know, a whole lot of the town feels like they want their voice represented on the planning board too. So how do we do that? Yeah, I guess where I'm curious and how to actual, I mean curious to hear you talk about how to actualize that, right? Because I'm thinking in terms of, there are six car members of the planning board who all have their own views and opinions that I think they would all say are independent views and opinions. So when I hear diversity of voices, I think about diversity. We want people from different income levels, different generations, different racial perspectives, which we know we literally do not have in this pool. So when you're looking at different candidates who are individual people, how do you assess, how do you consider diversity? What do you mean by that? Well, I think that there's been controversy in the past year or so over certain decisions that the planning board has made. And I think that and during all of our campaigns, we talked to people about how they felt about downtown development and so on. And it's pretty clear to me that at least half the town was unhappy with the downtown buildings and certain aspects of them. So I wouldn't want a situation where we just have every single member of the planning board or a large majority of the planning board lined up to support something that a proportional amount of the town doesn't. So I think in other towns, and I've said this before in the town council meetings, there are Republicans and Democrats. And we set aside a certain number of seats on the planning board for the Democrats and a certain number of seats for the Republicans. And the diversity of voices is baked in. Here we don't have that, so we have to figure out a way to make sure that we get that diversity on the planning board, which is a very important committee. So, you know, you've heard this from me before. I've tried to argue it in different ways. So I just, I don't know, the point that the planning board chair made, that she wants the person to feel positive and committed to strengthening and growing Amherst Economic Development and building housing infrastructure, particularly in the downtown village areas, that might be a question that we would ask to see what people answered, you know? They might say, yes, you know, I fought against that or I was all for that or whatever. So that we would get an idea of, you know, whether that person was going to add, make the planning board more proportional in voices. Sarah. So, I understand what you're saying. I want to be really clear that even when I think that OKA tried very hard to make decisions that, you know, we want an open-minded people, you know, we didn't want anybody who was set one way or the other, when we made our recommendations, we were still hammered by other counselors and by the public and by bloggers and by the planning board and the zoning board appeals themselves who consistently said the decisions that we were making, the people that we were recommending were based on politics. And I'm going to say this again with consistency for like the 25 millionth time. When there are decisions made for the town that are so large, I do not think that anyone who is on town council who cares about Amherst holistically as a town should be looking at what I don't want someone serving making these decisions that is so hell bent on a perspective that they cannot listen to, see or consider other options that does not bring us to a middle ground, that does not ever allow us to openly and with a pure heart and an open mind, like think about things that are different from what maybe our initial knee-jerk reaction to something is. When I said the things that the people that I recommended, it was not political, I meant it and I don't want to see this political. I would rather have find ways to ask questions or see how everybody's sitting together, how they work with each other. I want to see people who don't have their mind completely made up. I don't want to see people that are angry, which is something I struggle with myself. I will admit that. I would like to see people who are excited about Amherst and its future and that are not entrenched. I want to see people who like to work with each other and listen to each other. So I would rather avoid this somehow, honestly and truly. Yeah, I would say, so there's two points I want to make and why I'm uncomfortable with having this as a part of selection guidance. So I think the first thing to note is Darcy, particularly referenced some of the building, the larger building projects in town, but I'm not sure if, no one who's currently on the planning board was on the planning board. I believe when those projects were approved. And Spring Street doesn't exist yet. So I think that to say, well, the planning board approved these projects and we don't like them and so we need people who were against them ignores the fact that most of the planning board wasn't there for a lot of the buildings that have been focused. But I think the other thing is to say that the planning board is a regulatory body largely that interprets the zoning by-law and applies it. And so I think we acknowledge that it has become a very politicized body in this town. But I think to say that we're going to lean in to the politicization of the planning board by making sure that we have people who were opposed to previous planning board decisions actually does a disservice to the body and only further makes it more polarizing and more political as opposed to respecting what it really should be, which is a body that just applies the zoning by-law of town. So if we're talking about diversity of voices as saying it'd be great to have people who experience the town in different ways, people who experience the town as low income people, people who experience the town as a young family trying to buy a house or a renter who's looking to rent some of these new units, that I would support. But if we're saying diversity of voices as we want people who have differing political agendas, I don't think I would support that as a piece of selection guidance. Darcy. I guess I would just say that I feel responsible to represent my constituents and they're what they want. So that it became pretty clear to me that at least half the town wants a voice on the planning committee, so on the planning board. So I guess I would be, I personally would really want to make sure that the voices became equalized to represent my own constituents. Sarah. And I don't want to also be so naive as to say that we don't know that the planning board itself, I don't know how to say this without, I hear what Darcy's saying. I want to make sure that we are across the board being fair and this is again me being naive and all of our hearts, we look at these people because I don't think that we want to say, I don't want to say that I think that, well everybody that, I think we also need to be honest with ourselves about what's being represented, right? So like Evan said, you want to look for diversity of, let's keep looking for diversity of different viewpoints and then I think we'll probably be getting to what Darcy's saying as far as the diversity of voices. George. We have two of what I look to be three elements for selection criteria and I'd like us to just come to some resolution. My thought would be that the third element would be essentially simply a description of the nature of this kind of particular body. So a planning board, just a statement of what traditionally planning boards look like or what are the kinds of things that are traditionally required for service on a planning board. These are very specialized bodies. They're not just, right? So if we do come up with a third, maybe we could just have the two. Well right now what we have is input from the chair seems appropriate. Our criteria for healthy body, we've agreed upon, I think we're okay there and we're just struggling with this third thing and it seems to me whatever it's, if it's going to be a third element, it should be fairly straightforward and descriptive. I would turn to the planning department or to, right? And just have them, again, getting some input from people who do this for a living and in terms of what these kinds of bodies traditionally look like. Pretty descriptive and that would be it. Trying to get into diversity of this or that or political stuff is just, they'll come out in the wash and there's no way we can use it anyway. So if we're gonna have a third element, what do you all want? I seems to me what would be useful to me would be a description provided by the planning department as to what these kinds of bodies traditionally look like. In other words, factual information, description that we could use in evaluating candidates. If that's controversial, then maybe we should just go with one or two. Alyssa. George, I think you're missing the handout we wrote. That's exactly what that is. Good, and we've got it. We've already got that piece. And we wrote that and then we asked the planning director to have input on that. I do want to just comment since it's out there in the air now and obviously press will do with the press will do. I totally disagree that half the community is against the belief that that's not a factual statement. That's your interpretation of what you heard during the campaign. That's not what I heard during the campaign. That's not what I believe to be true. I also believe that people look at things a lot differently when they look at the revenue that's coming in and the fact that we didn't have to make massive cuts to our budgets because we had revenue coming in from projects that some people like looking at, some people don't like looking at and most people actually don't care at all when it comes right down to it if we're going to make statements like that. I think including the handout that covers what George said is really important because it's not just important for the applicants, but it's important for the town council to remind ourselves just like we put it in our report when we had our 40 page report or whatever we gave them back in Mac. I think the other thing that we need to continue to educate our constituents about is that what you want, what some people have wanted, is they wanted a previous planning board to interpret the current bylaw a different way. The previous planning board did not choose to do that. They felt they had plenty of legal grounds not to do it that way. The answer isn't to change the planning board members. The answer is to change the zoning bylaw. The zoning bylaws often come out of planning board meetings, right? Because they see what they deal with and they're like, oh wow, this isn't working out the way we thought. Let's change the zoning bylaw. And that's why they would bring things to tell me to change them. We, of course, as a town council now have this ability now that we meet more often to say our constituents are telling us this part of the zoning bylaw doesn't work right. And then we give a revised zoning bylaw to any planning board to get them to interpret. It is true that there is a level of interpretation. It is true that that has been politically frustrating for people throughout history. But the reality is still that the place that you represent is in engaging people to serve on committees who have the skills that you need for a particular committee and then giving them bylaws that are good bylaws that you think are good bylaws that your constituents think are good bylaws to work within. It isn't their job to push as hard as they can to work around the bylaws because they have a particular political viewpoint. It's their job to deal with the bylaws they have and make the bylaws better. So that's what I consider my responsibility, my constituents, is make the bylaws better so that whoever's interpreting them, you're not giving them the wiggle room that you're afraid you don't want them to have. So one thing I wanna point out is in section six that we adopted was said in advance of interviews the OCA chair shall distribute to the town council and all interviewees the adopted selection guidance, interview questions and committee handouts. And so the committee handout that Alyssa referenced is something that will be given to the applicants and the town council as part of sort of this interview packet. So I guess then the question before us is whether we want, we already agreed on these first two sections of selection guidance. The question is, do we want a third section that sort of other things we want the council to consider that aren't part of the other two? Darcy has thrown out one idea that she would include in that. Going into this conversation, I thought was it would be the planning board chair gave us a lot of sort of specific professional things. My thing would be more, I was thinking in terms of more character traits of people who don't have rigid positions on something. I don't think it's, I think it's bad if someone comes in with a very hard rigid position on something. I was thinking on things like, I remember when I was talking to councilor Schreiber about his service on the planning board and I said, what made the planning board successful? What's the one thing? And he said the ability to collaborate with people and to compromise with people. And so my thought was those were the things I would include in this section, not being rigidly wed to something, being able to play well with others. Having this discussion now, I feel like perhaps it's something, it's hard to evaluate that as selection guidance and perhaps that's something that's better worked into a question, which we already have right now, a question about something, about tell us about how you've collaborated with others. And so having heard what George just said, now I'm questioning whether we have this third section or if the character traits that I'm looking for don't make sense as a, we want people who play well together as a put and maybe just working into the question. So what are people's thoughts on that? Am I, I don't know if I said that coherently. Yeah. So I think it was Mark Parent actually who I think I brought this up when first doing this, gave me, I thought an excellent criteria of things to look for. I don't know if I should be, I think that is in that. And I personally loved that because he did cover a lot of things about being professional, but and you need different professions, yadda yadda, you need to know what you're doing and with codes and this and that, but he also really brought up some very good points about how someone can effectively serve, right, with other people. So I don't know if there's a way that we could just, just like we say, well, the chair is asking for these things, we could maybe give some of those things as like our general, we have some things. So I think we should incorporate them in some way as it could just be like traits that are successful, you know, just and some of the things, and you may think that, well, in an interview, I'm not gonna see it. I will tell you from the interviews that I did, you don't have to search for that information. No, seriously, in three minutes, people will tell you in many different ways how they do want those things as well as how they feel about things. You don't have to search for it. You'll see it. I don't think there's any harm in putting that in there, but mostly I think the third document, so we might wanna just say like even you could put in with a healthy multi-member body, these are things that make a certain person work well in a committee. And then the third document which I think would just be the description of what the planning board, the zoning board, whatever does, because those are the facts. And I, you know, you try to stay as close to facts that other people can't dispute as you can. George? I agree, Sarah, that this does seem important. So I guess Evan's question is do we need a third element? And I'm feeling that a third element to this would be helpful. Not to create more work for you. And it would be along the lines of what Sarah might be suggesting in terms of something that maybe Mark Parent had also spelled out. But I think it's true that when we're looking at the candidates that this is an element that I think most of us are thinking about, not just what the input from the chair has been, not just our broad criteria for a healthy body, but you know, can this person work with a body, do they seem collaborative, capable of compromising their evidence for this in their record and also in terms of how the interview goes. So this could be a third element. Alyssa? I agree, and I'm not sure if it gets, it needs to be in there because we want it to be something for selection guidance. But I think it also, and I won't be here for your questions conversation. And so the thing I'm gonna throw out now that you have on Wednesday is that I wonder if there's a way, given that we could tweak these questions to be more specific to planning board and things that we've been hearing, right? Because there should be some relationship between the selection guidance and the interview questions, is how there is already a question about collaboration. But I think that one of the really big philosophical differences that we should try and get at that I think actually touches on the political nature, but in a different way, is how do we ask a question beyond the collaboration things good, right? Like they can talk about how they've worked on large committees or small committees or whatever kinds of committees and that's always cool. But another question, and I leave it to you to think about, is how to get across to people, my, what I believe to be successful committee work, which is that you're not getting appointed to come in and say, I represent the people of the town who don't like the downtown buildings. So you lose every vote, so good for you. What have you brought to the process? Nothing, you've brought that people don't like it, but we don't have a majority and we're not gonna change the zoning by-law and we're not gonna change whether or not somebody gets a permit, but we got some press. That's useless, I think that's useless at town council, I think it's useless at historical commission, I think it's useless at planning board. If you can't come in with an, we all have our political biases, of course, but if you can't come in and say, my job is to interpret the zoning by-law in a way that makes sense based on what we've done so far and the strength, you know, whether, I don't know that we wanna say any of the stuff about strengthening downtown, but what I'm trying to get across is, I don't need planning board members, I don't wanna appoint planning board members who think they're just there to appoint, to represent a point of view in town without collaborating to get votes to either deny permits or to change the zoning by-law. Being on the end of a vote is a useless form of service and just frustrates the rest of the committee. You should not be in lockstep, absolutely not. You shouldn't, I'll be a rubber stamp, but you have to be on different things, you have to be willing to talk about, well, I sorta get what you're saying on this, but no, I can't go any further on that, but if your only goal is to say, I hate downtown buildings, I wanna weed those people out and I would like to be able to weed that out with a question rather than guessing based on their Google results. Darcy. So, Alyssa, are you saying that you would want, if there are diverse voices in that way, that you would want that person to be able to work on amending the by-law in the way that he or she wants it or, yeah, no, absolutely. You don't want someone who's just, no, no, no, you want someone who is going to be working and trying to convince the other members to do whatever it is, you know, to amend the by-law or work with him or her to do whatever they're putting forward. So, I agree totally with that, but that's the reason that we need the diverse voices. Sarah. This is what I'm gonna say, because I think we've talked a lot about all of this. I would say that, yes, I think we want to maybe add some of the things. I loved a lot of the lists that Mark Parent gave us. I think that we should add that in somewhere. I don't know that necessarily has to be the third thing. I think we could simplify it and perhaps put it under what makes a healthy multi-member body. These are characteristics in a certain individual that makes them a creative, a working member, right, of a multi-member body. I think that what Alyssa's getting at, which I think there is so much wisdom in, is that an effective member of a body is able to bring their perspective, even if it is completely different than 12 other peoples, bring it to other people in a way that makes them willing to think and talk about it and then come somewhere, come to a middle ground, come, you have to be able to persuade people, not just piss them off. So, I don't think there's any other way than just saying, talking about collaboration, that you can really get to that with a person. I am thinking that if you ask that collaboration question, then most likely, people who have that point of view will tell you, I worked on such and such a committee, we had a problem with blah, blah, blah, blah, I helped facilitate something. I don't know if an actual ask question is going to get to that. And I think the only third criteria, like I said, would just be the description of what that body does. Okay, so what I'm hearing is that, it sounds like people feel it would be useful to have either another section of selection guidance or perhaps worked into the section on criteria for healthy member body enhancing that with some traits of members of that body that make it healthy, that make it productive and incorporating that potentially into the selection guidance. We've all thrown out a couple ideas of what that would be. Here's what I'm gonna recommend we do. We already have a meeting scheduled for Wednesday. That meeting was supposed to be just about interview questions, but I think what we're also finding from this conversation is that, in some ways these two are very closely related because the selection guidance is going to inform our interview questions. So I am going to close this conversation now and reopen it at the beginning of our Wednesday meeting and what I'm gonna add, I will try and find that list from Mark Parent and add it to the packet along with our current questions and what I'm gonna ask the members who will be there Wednesday to do is to think about based on what you see in that list, based on your thoughts, take some time to think about that and bring to the meeting the sort of characteristics or traits of a member of the body that you think would be useful to include. What we'll do is we'll open the conversation on Wednesday's meeting with what are those traits, hopefully come to some consensus around what are those traits and characteristics, work them into the selection guidance and then that will be a jumping off point for, I think we'll probably use the questions we have as sort of the foundation for our questions about interview questions, but then based on the selection guidance that we all just agreed to and the traits that we know we're looking for, how maybe can we modify the questions to better elicit responses that show us those. I think if we sit here now and we try and think of what those traits are, we're gonna take a long time and it's better if we each go home and think about that, giving you a little bit of homework and come with them on Wednesday. Darcy. I just have that I would love it if we could all think about how we could include diversity of voices within those traits in a way that would be acceptable to the members of this committee. Okay. Okay, so I'm gonna close that agenda item and we will continue that at our Wednesday meeting. So three things before we head out today. So regarding agenda item six, our discussion of our January 6th report to council. I hope you had an opportunity to read the OCA report on liaisons. That will be discussed tonight at the council. So mostly what we're gonna be talking about is the conversation that this committee had on 1220 that recommended nine town bodies that should the OCA is recommending have a liaison. I will also be providing the council with a very brief update about where we are in the process for the planning board. Our next meeting is this Wednesday at 9.30 in the morning. It is not in this room because I believe CRC is meeting in this room at that time. It will be in the IT conference room or the lower level conference room. I got lost trying to find it the first time. So if you don't know where it is, give yourself a little bit or maybe go down there now and find it, it's sort of a weird little room. It feels like the situation room. It does, right? It does. So that's where we, right now the meeting is scheduled 9.30 to 10.30. I'm hoping we can do it in an hour, although if we have to finish up selection guidance, that might be ambitious. But I'm hoping it won't take up too much time. So that's the second thing I wanna say. Third thing is now that we have declared the applicant pool sufficient, we can move on to scheduling interviews. The date I threw out to all of you was January 22nd. Every person who confirmed they are still interested, I asked if they were available on January, the evening of January 22nd, and they all confirmed that they were. So I am going to, because some of them confirmed that on December 18th, I'm going to reconfirm that date with them. But given that every member of this committee reported they were available that evening and given every member, every applicant who confirmed their continued interest confirmed that they were available that evening, unless I hear otherwise from one of the applicants, I will likely move to schedule the planning board interviews for that evening. I think there's then some logistical conversations that we need to have to make sure we have everything ready. But in theory, if we have selection guidance and interview questions done at our Wednesday meeting, we should have the interview packet ready to go to the council and to the applicants. Are there thoughts, comments, questions on that, George? Just really quickly, to conduct the interviews in these special meetings, all we need is a quorum, correct? Correct, we do need a quorum, although I was hoping that every member of this committee would be there. Absolutely, I'm just saying, if someone can't make it or the car breaks down or they get sick or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, that wouldn't sink the meeting as long as we have a quorum. As long as we have a quorum. Thank you. And again, this meeting, the only agenda item would be the interviews. There will be no votes taken at that meeting. Alyssa? What time? I would have to, all I, the feelers I put out were the evening of January 22nd. Right, I'm just getting a sense of, could we quickly get a sense from the five of us, what time we can do? Because depending on, because we're not talking about numbers, depending on how many people we have to rotate through, could take a couple of hours. So are we available at six or are we available at seven or what time are we available? Yeah. I've cleared my calendar for that. So, yeah. I could be available by six, the only thing is I just found out that my other half will be gone on that date, so I might just want to talk to you or Angela just, I mean, they're old kids. Was this somewhere to stash my old kids in case they need to be close to me? Stashed? Yes. Yeah. That room there, yeah, although it gets very cold. Is your meeting six o'clock? It sounds like, I think six is good. So again, I will run that by, I'm sure of prioritizing the availability of the applicants right now. Absolutely, but I'd shoot for six so that we're not here. I will throw out to them six and then. Six works if they'll all be back in town from their jobs, et cetera. And I will give you an update when I have more information on that. Public comment? OK, so with that, I am going to adjourn us at 11.39 AM.